


And In Between, a Little Light

by backjeanpocket



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: 1990s, Aged-Up Losers Club (IT), And They Were NOT Roommates, Childhood Friends, College, Cosmic Woo Woo Shit, Eddie Kaspbrak is Bad at Feelings, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier-centric, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Feelings Realization, Fix-It of Sorts, Friends to Lovers, Gay Disaster Eddie Kaspbrak, M/M, Maturin to the Rescue, Oblivious Eddie Kaspbrak, POV Eddie Kaspbrak, Post-IT (2017), Screw Destiny, Slow Burn, Twenty-Something Losers Club (IT)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:01:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25597714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backjeanpocket/pseuds/backjeanpocket
Summary: If you'd asked Eddie Kaspbrak at age 13 what he thought his life would look like at age 20, college would have been the furthest thing from his mind. He'd once hardly expected to live another day, let alone another seven years. And yet, against all odds, Eddie managed to become a basically normal human person with basically normal, non-killer clown-related human person problems. Like midterms, and term papers, and being Richie Tozier's fake boyfriend.Or, what if the Losers Club left Derry, but stayed together? / Post-It Chapter 1 WIP
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	And In Between, a Little Light

**Author's Note:**

> This is my original WIP adaptation of a very long and ongoing RP with AO3 user star_cuffed_jeans, which we've been working on for over three months now. I'll be rolling it out chapter by chapter, and will try to post an update each week. Please be patient with me, as I'm gradually working on transposing our omniscient POV into Eddie's POV, and it is a lot to sift through.
> 
> Some of you may recognize parts of this from my one-shot "To All the Aspiring Ventriloquists I've Loved Before"! For me, that lil nugget ended up being a sort of test run for this.
> 
> Kind of a Thwarting Destiny Fix-It. Also, we can have a little mid-90s Losers Club, as a treat.

SUMMER, 1989.

//

Eddie Kaspbrak will never get what he wants.

This is the thought that flashes to his mind as he's darting through the yard of the house on Neibolt Street, and again as he's scrabbling at a web of leather straps in the basement of Center Street Drug, and again as he's wading knee-deep through Derry's subterranean boneyard, miles below everything he once thought he knew, and again as his mother announces over breakfast for what feels like the hundred thousandth time that some "fairies" were killed on the bridge, or in the park, or in front of the courthouse, _"serves them right."_

Eddie Kaspbrak will never get what he wants. This is the thought he has, over and over. He isn't sure what it means. He isn't even sure it's _his._ It feels somehow inherited, like it's being handed to him from somewhere (or some _thing)_ else.

He isn't sure what it means, and he isn't sure if it's his, and yet he feels it to be deeply true. It's summer, and there's a monster hunting him and his six friends, and _Eddie Kaspbrak will never get what he wants._

Which is why he's quiet on a wet-thick evening at the beginning of July, rolling with thunder and the promise of rain, when Mike insists while they're all huddled in the clubhouse that—

"If they make it through this, they have to stick together."

—because some vague cosmic inkling tells Eddie that, even if they _do,_ even if they fight tooth and nail and make it out of this thing alive, it won't go the way he wants it to. What once might have been will be ravaged by time and distance. And even then, there might be a happy ending on the other side, but he's pretty sure it won't be his. 

And then Richie looks at him, and there's something in his eyes that makes him ache.

And for a moment, he thinks he sees a shimmering reflection of a turtle in his glasses.

And time goes by.

* * *

FALL, 1989.

//

They survive.

It's a crisp October evening, and the seven of them are midway through their first semester of seventh grade, and they're sprawled out on the floor of Ben's basement, munching on pizza, being actively disgusting — shotgunning cans of orange soda, belching competitively. They're debating the merits and pitfalls of various superpowers, playing "would you rather?," posing increasingly absurd and bizarre hypotheticals, when Mike insists that—

"Someday, they should get out of Derry together."

—and again, Eddie has the vague, hopeless sense that he's trying to rewrite the ending and it _won't work won't work won't work_ and _he's really pushing his luck now_ and _Eddie Kaspbrak will never get what he wants._

And at the end of the night, Richie and Eddie are downstairs, alone, the last two kids to be picked up. They're tucked into a small floral loveseat, flipping through a new _X-Men_ comic, covering the speech bubbles and improvising the dialogue, and Richie is doing a Southern accent that sounds like Foghorn Leghorn, and Eddie is rolling his eyes, but he's shaking with the effort of containing his laughter. And when they land on the last page, there's a cartoonish turtle emblazoned on the back cover, and they don't remember it being there before. But Eddie runs his fingers over it, and a light flares in the back of his mind, a white-hot spark of some rebellious flame. And he tears the turtle out, and folds it in half, and licks the fold, and—

 _"Here,"_ he says simply, handing Richie a half. _"Keep this."_ And Richie looks at him and slides it into his pocket, and it feels like they might be getting away with something.

And time goes by.

* * *

FALL, 1996.

//

All this to say, Eddie Kaspbrak had once hardly expected to live another day, let alone another seven years.

And yet, against all odds, that's what happened.

Against all odds, Eddie managed to become a basically normal human person with basically normal, _non-killer clown-related_ human person problems. Not that he's perfectly well-adjusted, mind you. Not that his problems are necessarily _easier_ by virtue of not putting him in mortal peril. Middle school was hard all on its own, even excluding an imminent existential threat. So was high school. He also could have done without the whole _liking boys_ thing, which, even before he'd looked it in the eyes and put a name to it, had once been its own kind of death sentence — and he can't ever be sure he's out of the woods on that front, either.

But, hey, you have to take the good with the bad. And things are certainly better, which is to say safer, here, on his sprawling, landlocked liberal arts college campus than they were in his little coastal hometown, which had been as haunted by a shapeshifting, interdimensional alien with gaping jaws and countless teeth as it had been by normal human people who ate normal human things with normal human mouths, and then took up normal human weapons and killed boys who liked boys.

The point is, Eddie Kaspbrak lived. And now, he's basically normal. He's pretty much a card-carrying member of Club Normal, at least as far as his Business Communication major is concerned. At 20 years old, Eddie is facing down such mortal terrors as midterms and term papers and being single and _(shudder)_ student loans, which really _are_ giving his vanquished childhood foe a run for its money.

He’s so normal, in fact, that he’s running late for class. 

It’s Interpersonal Comm, and it’s the first day, and he’s running late, which is what he gets for striking up a conversation about crown molding with Ben while they were unpacking boxes in their dorm room. On the way, he remembers that, as an ice breaker, the professor has asked the class to bring in a list of ten facts about someone they know.

So, in his head, Eddie starts cataloguing.

10 Things Eddie Kaspbrak Knows About Richie Tozier:

1\. When he eats Kit-Kats, he has to peel the sides off first, and then take them apart layer by layer.

2\. He still uses laundry detergent and fabric softener interchangeably, despite Eddie’s repeated, blistering, _well-informed_ objections.

3\. He infamously threw up all over his SAT (but still landed in the 90th percentile — presumably, once they’d de-chunked the pages).

4\. His angst anthem of choice is secretly “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. (even though he tells people it’s “Know Your Enemy” by Rage Against the Machine).

5\. His wardrobe is decidedly terrible — and with a fashion designer for a roommate, he really has no excuse for it.

6\. He’s the only person Eddie knows who can make a perfectly browned pancake every single time. (It’s the only time Eddie ever eats pancakes.)

7\. Despite his two semesters of intensive dialect training, all of his Southern accents sound like Foghorn Leghorn.

8\. He’s been Eddie’s best friend since Pre-K.

9\. He’s the bravest person Eddie knows.

Eddie’s throwing back a green juice and deliberating about the final fact when his pager buzzes. He stops, tugs it out of his back pocket, and sees Richie’s number attached to a code he’s never used before:

_74._

And suddenly, he's got one lined up:

10\. He needs a favor.


End file.
